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"I was under the impression from the Airport clerk that he had hesitations about letting them on."

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0501/18/pzn.01.html

Michael Touhey took Mohamed Atta's ticket this morning. His story is one you'll only hear here. Here's Drew Griffin.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DREW GRIFFIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The 9/11 Commission would describe the dawning of September 11 as temperate and nearly cloudless. By 4:00 a.m., Michael Touhey was already at work at the U.S. Air ticket counter at the airport in Portland, Maine.

MICHAEL TOUHEY: Crystal clear blue sky. It was just a fabulous to go to work.

GRIFFIN: One hour and 43 minutes into Touhey's day, two men approached his counter rushing to catch the 6:00 flight to Boston.

TOUHEY: They had a tie and jacket on. All right? And as I'm looking at them, you know, they're holding their IDs up, and I'm looking at them. It's not nice, but I said, "Jeez, if this doesn't look like two Arab terrorists, I've never seen two Arab terrorists."

GRIFFIN (on camera): That was your...

TOUHEY: Thought.

GRIFFIN: ... first reaction?

TOUHEY: That was my thought as I'm looking at them. I'm looking at their licenses, and I'm looking -- and that thought ran through my mind.

GRIFFIN: Where did that thought go? TOUHEY: I don't know. Immediately, I felt guilty about thinking something like that. I just said, "This is awful." How -- you know, I've checked in thousands of Arabic people over the years. You know, doing the same job. Businessmen. I said, "These are just a couple of Arab business guys."

GRIFFIN (voice-over): But something about these two men was different. Touhey says the younger man, Abdul Aziz Al-Omari, could barely speak English. The other was Mohamed Atta. Touhey says he had the eyes of a killer.

TOUHEY: He did. He had the deadest eyes I've ever seen.

GRIFFIN: Setting aside his gut reaction, Touhey issued the boarding passes. The flight was leaving in 17 minutes. And Atta and Omari still had to clear security. But Atta told Touhey he wanted not only the boarding passes for the U.S. air flight to Boston, but also the passes for their connecting American Airlines flight to Los Angeles. Atta, the mastermind behind the 9/11 plan, was facing the plan's first obstacle, a gate agent with an attitude.

TOUHEY: When I just gave them the ticket, I gave them the boarding cards for the Boston flight. And he says -- he says, "Isn't this -- isn't there one-stop checking?" And I said, "No, you're connecting to American Airlines down in Boston."

GRIFFIN: Had Atta argued, he would have missed his flight. Touhey says the two men turned in a huff and hurried to the gate. Less than three hours later, Touhey was told by a co-worker that American Flight 11 had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

TOUHEY: I said, "Oh, my god." I said, "I put two people on that plane." And I was feeling horrible. You know?

Here I was thinking these guys were terrorists. You know? And I just had a flashback.

I said, "Now the poor bastards are dead." And then you got the word on the second plane and it was like a punch in the stomach.

GRIFFIN (on camera): You knew then that those two guys were involved?

TOUHEY: As soon as I heard it. The second I heard it. I said, "I was right. I was right."

You know, and it was just -- I don't know how you describe it, how your stomach twists and turns. You get sick to your stomach.

GRIFFIN: Still does?

TOUHEY: To this day. Not so much that -- I felt ashamed that I did not react to my instincts.

GRIFFIN (voice-over): His instinct to label the Arab men that morning as terrorists, to slow down their check and to search their bags, to possibly make the ringleader miss his flight, all of that is post-9/11 thinking. On that September morning, hassling two men simply because they were Arabs would not have been politically correct, Touhey says. His job was to get them on the flight, and he did.

Once he and other employees realized what was happening, they called the FBI. And within hours, Touhey found himself viewing this videotape of the two Arab men he had ticketed pass going through security. He told the FBI who they were. He also told them that he observed something curious on the tape.

TOUHEY: And they said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, these guys had on -- they were very business looking. They had on ties and jackets." And I said, "If you look at these guys, they both have like open collar, they have like dress shirts with an open collar." I said, "But that's them."